MUENSTER, Germany— Florian Voss, an 18-year-old rickshaw driver who good-naturedly pedaled me through a Muenster park in a downpour, has watched the city change since he could walk. “I go across this bridge every morning to school, and now there is someone singing under it,” he said as we stood beneath the Torminbrucke admiring the disembodied vocal stylings of Susan Philipsz.

Philipsz wistful song is part of her sound piece for Muenster’s once-a-decade international exhibition, Sculpture Projects Muenster.

Just as contemporary art can be as much about the creative process as the end product, traveling around Muenster to view—and hear—the Sculpture Projects infuses the experience with a sense of adventure and discovery. The journey provides varied perspectives on this charming German city, as well as on the interaction of the site-specific works to the urban environment.

The project originated in 1977 as an effort to enlighten citizens about modern sculpture in the wake of the less-than-welcoming reception for American kinetic artist George Rickey’s donation of a work to Muenster and its residents. Every ten years since then, international artists have been invited to create sculptures for the public site of their choice, renewing the dialogue between art and public space by addressing issues brought to light in the intervening decade.  

“Consider the enormous time between each exhibition,” said Project Coordinator Christine Litz. “If you go back ten years ago, it has been a totally different life.” Over the years, participating artists have responded to changes not only in society and urban spaces, but also in artistic concepts and materials. Litz contrasts the social critique and interactive experiments of 1997 and 2007 with the work of the Muenster pioneers, who “were dealing with the idea of the possibilities of art.”

Some of those earlier works are still on view in the city, including large concrete structures like Donald Judd’s untitled concentric rings and Claes Oldenberg’s Pool Balls on the shores of the manmade Lake Aa in the city’s expansive parkland. These once-controversial pieces are among the more than 50 sculptures that have become permanent fixtures of the local landscape, as well as referents for successive generations of invitees and viewers.

This year, for example, French artist and curator Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster has replicated a selection of works commissioned for the last three projects (1977, 1987, and 1997) in quarter-scale and arranged them in relation to their positions on the city map—except that her miniature stand-ins are set about a field with sloping edges, like props staged in an amphitheater. This open-air diorama condenses the Sculpture Projects’ history into a “greatest hits” compilation or Cliff Notes companion, which first-time visitors can peruse to contextualize the new additions.   

Only time, and Muenster’s inhabitants—whose appraisals, according to Litz, can inform which new pieces the city exercises its option to buy (even the homeless weigh in by awarding a prize for the artwork that most represents the reality of life on these streets)—will tell whether the newcomers stand up to their predecessors.

Horst Heiringhoff, the enthusiastic art collector and proprietor of Central Hotel Muenster, which is decorated with some of his acquisitions, notes that this year’s artists are not as renowned as the class of 1987 (which included Richard Artschwager, George Brecht, Jenny Holzer, Rebecca Horn, and Richard Tuttle, among others). But the relative anonymity of the latest crop encourages interested parties to learn more about them and study their maneuvers, he adds. Upon my arrival, Heiringhoff proudly shared his book of signed sketches by art stars he had hosted over the years and lamented that Ilya Kabakov had just canceled his reservation because he was already worn out from previous stops on the Grand Tour.

Later, I found consolation and a chance to commune vicariously with Kabakov through his poetic 1997 structure, entitled Look Up and Read the Words… At first glance, the towering mast by the lake appears to be some kind of electrical conductor; upon closer inspection its 22 steel antennae turn a patch of sky into a ruled page from a composition book. Strung between the lines, filigree wire letters etch the air with a passage in German, which translates in part as: “You look up into the open sky, up into the blue above, where the clouds roll by/ It is perhaps the most beautiful thing that you have ever done or seen in your life.” At the risk of overstating the effect, Kabakov persuades you to participate in his work by attuning you to the natural surroundings.

“That’s the purpose of the project: making people look at what’s around them,” observed Kimberly Davis, director of the L.A. Louver gallery in Venice, California, after our preliminary tour of the works that dot Muenster's downtown. She appreciated Pae White’s marzipan likenesses of the “taco trucks” that are a common sight in the city where both artist and dealer live. White’s roadside inspiration has also inspired the confectioners at Muenster's Café Kleinman; their sugary tacos are displayed in the sweetshop’s window on the popular thoroughfare Prinzipalmarkt.

Locals may relate better to the tidbits spun steps away by Marko Lehanka’s Blume fur Muenster (Flower for Muenster), with its petals formed by severed surfboards and a calyx formed by a monitor and speaker system that broadcasts computer-generated tales. These same locals, however, may be disturbed to find that their neighbors—whose names and addresses have been fed into the computer—or even themselves, meet their demise at the end of each nonsensical episode. With dark humor and a wink at our age-old curiosity about the intimate details of other’s lives, Lehanka uses new technology to resuscitate the ancient art of storytelling and the oral dissemination of news (and gossip) by the proverbial town crier.

“This project really has a human scale to it,” said Davis. “A sense of the hand that’s making all this is one of the things that connects people to art and really makes it meaningful.”

In the park, beneath the bridge, in the rain, Philipsz mournfully sang both lovers’ parts from Jacques Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffman, based on the German writer E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Story of the Lost Reflection, which lends the sound piece its evocative title. As Philipsz’s entrancing voice bounced back and forth across Lake Aa, I felt as though I heard distant echoes of the mysterious muse known as the Lady of the Lake, a figure from Arthurian legend memorably conjured by Pre-Raphaelite poets and painters.

A storybook scene is also evoked by Guillaume Bijl in his improbable Archaeological Site, part of a series he calls “Sorry” works of “absurd poetry.” In a city in which church steeples remain enduring attractions, Bijl has implanted a shingled spire in a ditch dug deep into a hilltop.

Peering over the edge of the fenced pit at the intact facade, with a red glow emanating from the archways on all four sides, I wanted to believe for a moment that I was gazing at a remnant from the Brothers Grimm, who like fantasist town criers once collected and spread fairy tales in these parts. But I knew all too well that eyes, and artists, play tricks on us, and things are not always as they seem.